The further one pursues one’s studies of the countries west of India, whether in the camp or in the library, the larger looms the stately fabric of the Roman Empire of the East, and the more is felt the need of a work dealing comprehensively with this great subject. Our historians have allowed their interest to be absorbed by Europe; upon Asia and the rule of the Cæsars over some of the fairest portions of her vast territories for a period, which, commencing with the Roman Republic, may be said to extend down to the suppression of the despots of Trebizond by the Ottoman Turks in the latter half of the fifteenth century, they have scarcely bestowed more than an impatient glance. The period covers the bloom and fall of at least six great Asiatic dynasties—the Arsakids, Sasanians, Arab caliphs, Seljuk Turks, shahs of Kharizme, Tartar khans. It comes to an end among the ruins of Asiatic prosperity, when the Turkomans are pasturing their flocks among the débris of civilisation, and the Ottoman sultans, deriving their origin from a nomad Turkish tribe, are being carried to their zenith by the former subjects of the Cæsars, severed in the corps of Janissaries from their Western culture and Christian religion, and living only with the breath of their Mohammedan and Oriental king. This startling revolution in the political and economical condition of Asia, the effects of which are operative at the present day, may be traced back to the decisive blow which was struck at the Roman Empire of the East by the victory of the Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, over the Cæsar Romanus near Melazkert in Armenia in the year 1071. The three centuries of imperial rule in Asia which succeeded this event reveal few and spasmodic interruptions to the inclined plane of Western relapse. Then the darkness finally closes in; Constantinople falls (1453), and Western commerce is expelled from the Black Sea.
The empire of Trebizond takes its place in this great tragedy of history when the end is already in view. In the same year and the same month in which the Latins took Constantinople and the nobility of the imperial capital fled to the cities of Asia (April 1204), two youthful scions of the illustrious House of Comnenus appeared at the head of a body of Georgian mercenaries before the gates of Trebizond. The Comneni, whose name perhaps reveals an Italian origin, emerge into the light of history in the latter part of the tenth century, from a private station among the Greek nobility of Asia, where their hereditary estate was situated near Kastamuni, a town in the interior, which one may reach at the present day by a carriageable road from the port of Ineboli on the Black Sea. Manuel Comnenus, the first to bring fame to the family, was prefect of all the East under the Cæsar, Basil the Second (in 976); and his son, the scholarly Isaac Comnenus, was chosen by his contemporaries to occupy the imperial throne. The nephew of Isaac, the Emperor Alexius Comnenus (r. 1081–1118), is well known for the part which he played during the crusading era; and he was followed on the Byzantine throne by two of the most martial figures of that age of heroes, Kalo-Joannes (r. 1118–43) and Manuel (r. 1143–80). Manuel was succeeded by his cousin Andronicus Comnenus (r. 1182–85), an emperor who did much to purify the corrupt provincial administration of the Byzantine monarchy, and who perished in a domestic revolution, due to his severe measures against the high nobility. The murder of this prince was followed at no long interval by the Latin conquest of the capital; and the two Comneni who came to Trebizond in 1204 were sons of Manuel, son and heir to Andronicus, who had also perished in the aforesaid revolution.
Their names were Alexius and David; and they were assisted in their enterprise by their paternal aunt, Thamar, the offspring of their grandfather and a Georgian lady. The political condition of Trebizond during the interval between the murder of Andronicus and the Latin conquest of the capital is not definitely known; but the Greek city was probably feeling the pressure of the neighbouring kingdom of Georgia at the time of the advent of the two Greek princes. The prospects of relief, on the one hand, from this pressure, and, on the other, from dependence upon the rotten court of Constantinople under the hopeful rule of an illustrious family, must have operated as powerful inducements to the townspeople to welcome the new régime. Alexius Comnenus is accepted as master of the city, and his rising fortunes attract to his victorious standard some of the noblest of the refugees from the capital, flying into Asia before the Latins. Others range themselves round the person of Theodore Laskaris in Bithynia; and two rival Greek or Roman empires are established upon Asiatic soil, that of Nicæa, or Nice, the capital of Bithynia, and the empire of Trebizond.
The successors of Laskaris fought their way back to Constantinople, which was recovered from the Latin barons in 1261. A much less splendid fate was reserved for the family of Alexius Comnenus; yet the little empire on the Black Sea survived the restored Byzantine Empire; and a space of nearly a hundred years separates the fall of the last of the Greek cities of the interior (conquest of Philadelphia by the Sultan Bayazid in 1390) from the overthrow of the rule of the Comneni at Trebizond (1461). During a period of over 250 years these petty Greek princes contrived to elude the storms of Mussulman conquest behind the wall of mountains interposed between the interior and the coast. Sometimes as vassals of the Oriental dynasties, at other times in a state of independence, they ruled over the beautiful city and a narrow strip of seaboard of varying extent. Their possessions even included a part of the Crimea, of which the tribute was conveyed across the expanse of waters in the imperial galleys. Proud of their pompous titles of Grand-Comneni and Emperors of the Romans, or lords of all Anatolia, Georgia, and the Transmarine, they supplied their deficiencies in real power by elaborate ceremonials, and substituted the gorgeous cult of their patron saint, Eugenius, for the devotional exercises of the Christian religion. They might be consigned without regret to the limbo of history, were it not for the cause of which they were the late and debased representatives, but which, nevertheless, they contributed to sustain. Their territory afforded a home and holding ground to commerce; and, when the land routes through Asia Minor fell into disuse owing to the increase of anarchy, Trebizond became an emporium of the trade with the further Asia, diverted to the more secure avenue of the Armenian plains. This trade was conducted with great spirit by the Genoese from their factories at Trebizond, until Grand-Comneni, Italian merchants, and all the apparatus of civilisation were swept away by the Ottoman sultan, Mohammed the Second (1451–81). This type of Oriental exclusiveness came marching across the mountains some years after his conquest of Constantinople (1453). The citadel of Trebizond was given over to the Janissaries, the palace to a pasha; the last of the Comneni was transported to an exile in Europe, whence, not long afterwards, he was summoned to the capital and commanded to abjure the Christian faith. The firmness of his refusal and the dignity of his martyrdom cast a parting ray of glory through the shadows which had already closed upon his House. His body and those of the princes who died with him were thrown to the dogs beyond the walls of Constantinople. Only one-third of the inhabitants of Trebizond, and these the dregs of the populace, were suffered to remain in their native city. The remainder were compelled to emigrate, and their estates were confiscated. In 1475 the policy of expulsion of all Western influences was crowned by the Ottoman occupation of Caffa and Tana, the more northerly depôts of the Genoese in the Black Sea. European ships were expelled from these waters; where trade was banished ensued barbarism; and for three centuries these shores were forgotten by the West. A new era found expression in the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), which secured the free navigation of this sea. The first steamer made her appearance in 1836, and since then commerce has steadily increased. It flows along the shore, to be distributed throughout the interior, until it reaches the solid barrier of the Russian frontier. It is carried across Asia just outside that barrier on the backs of camels and mules. On the far side of the wall is heard the whistle of the locomotive, and the rumble of a train which not a bale of the hated products of European industry is permitted to invade.
Let the progressive states of modern Europe take heed lest their domestic rivalries result in the conversion of the Black Sea into a Russian lake, and the re-establishment of the old and melancholy order.
[1] J. P. Fallmerayer, born in 1790, the son of humble parents, whose flocks he tended on the mountain-sides as a boy. Died in 1861; a great scholar, a great writer, whose work has not yet received all the recognition which it deserves. [↑]
[2] Finlay, Mediæval Greece and the Empire of Trebizond, Oxford, 1877, p. 340. [↑]
[3] The dimensions of the interior are: length to head of apse, 33 feet; breadth, 21 feet 7 inches. [↑]
[4] The ornament is as follows: